Hanging with English nobles

You would think they'd have better taste in artwork

Highclere Castle in Newbury. Highclere is the location used for he Downton Abbey.

Photograph by: AFP
, Getty Images

Imagine 300,000 people a year paying to visit your house. Or that you built a zoo in your backyard to make sure there was something to keep your guests' children occupied. Such is life for English nobility who struggle to keep their stately mansions intact for their progeny. We shouldn't feel sorry for them - they're running family businesses. As well, I'm told most of them are still wealthy, although living in decidedly reduced circumstances compared with their grandparents.

Having been a guest of two dukes, one marchioness, a couple of barons and an honourable last week in England (along with thousands of other tourists, unfortunately), I've come to believe that if I owned one of these places, I'd abandon it to the National Trust, or otherwise not take on the burden of a house to which 14 generations before me had been devoted. Then again, as one of my travelling companions said, "It would be different if you'd grown up there."

Since I wasn't raised on a 40,000 acre estate and in a 200-room great house (although I like to imagine this on occasion), speculating is difficult, but I'll give it a try. If I had inherited my family home and continued to live there, it would have been demolished, the awful furniture not restored but taken to Goodwill, the gardens redone and so on.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the great houses is the saga of each generation - especially the wives - inflicting its taste on the inherited home. With respect to Chatsworth, a famous pile in the north of Derbyshire, the current generation seems focused on removing their grandmother's changes. The wife's renovations seem odd, closing in skylights and whatever, but who knows what she was reacting to, perhaps she hated her mother-in-law who built the skylights? At Longleat, the current 80-year-old Marchioness of Bath's mother dyed a beautiful carpet green at the turn of the last century and even the tour guides admit it was a dumb move. I'm sure the current owner would remove it if he had any taste. I inadvertently met him as he shuffled from his private section of the house to his personal garden. The official guidebook describes him as "eccentric," and indeed in his pseudomedieval garb he looked like the survivor of the drug-fuelled swinging London of the 1960s he's reputed to be. His damage to the house is limited to the portraits of himself he litters everywhere and his terrible personal artwork in some of the minor corridors.

Houses such as Chatsworth are now magnets for visitors. The family is out hustling it on TV, there are special events most weeks, such as Easter egg hunts for the kiddies; the shops do a brisk business, as do the tearooms and restaurants. Many great houses have been used as movie sets and this has given them a huge boost. For instance, the Downton Abbey location, in reality Highclere Castle in Berkshire, has gone from thousands of visitors a year to hundreds of thousands.

The good news is, at places such as Chatsworth, the honey and jam they sell is made on the estate, and the food in the cafés is local (if not from the estate) and, like most of the cuisine in rural England, excellent. As one of my travelling companions said: "Buy something and you're keeping the house going."

It would be odd to live in the midst of a tourist attraction. The current Duke of Devonshire's heir, in his thirties, lives at Chatsworth full time and gives the impression of being an environmental activist. At Pentworth, the lord of the manor lives in a wing, as do the remnants of the Curzon family who huddle in a rather splendid section of the astoundingly refined, Robert Adam-designed Kedleston Hall. We were late to depart Kedleston. I imagined the family staring at us from an upper floor as we walked away on the pea gravel drive. "I thought those horrid Canadians would never leave," I hear them muttering, as they return to the main house for tea.

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